That the market buying internal drives is generally willing to pay more for the product vs the people buying an external drive? Because cost of the parts (AKA Bill of Materials, or BOM) is only a small part of what determines the price on the shelf.
The fact the WD has a whole thing about refusing to honor the warranty (likely in violation of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act) should tell you what you really need to know.
I think you're being down voted because IP and encryption serve very different purposes in different ways. Look into the OSI model, which is the standard for modern network connectivity. IP lives at layer 3, network. TCP lives at layer 4. Encryption, such as SSL, lives at layer 6. I'm not even really sure how the IP layer would even have security, short of a VPN, which itself breaks the mesh network model.
Also, the Internet and many of its standard protocols were created a very long time ago. TCP/IP was created in 1974. The "Internet" at that point was acoustic couplers and directly dialing your destination, typically a university or major research company.
I agree that all websites should be HTTPS these days. It's why Google has been pushing it (and punishing those that don't) since 2017. But it's built on ancient designs.
Please stop using Express. Snowden (yes, that one) called out why a while back. It's pretty wild.
Mullvad is definitely the favorite among those that I would expect to have experience. Honorable mentions to Proton and IVPN. There's a big difference in ethics among providers. Given the entire point of a VPN (as a proxy to the external Internet), this is a critical point that can't be ignored. Otherwise you're just trading Comcast's spying for Kape's spying.
I recently switched to AirVPN, since it's one of the few to still support port forwarding.
TL;DR: It's about the warez "scene", specifically about music pre-releases. A decent read, but one you may have seen before.
Hell of a headline, but...
To delve into this intriguing topic, the researchers conducted an online survey with 328 initial participants, eventually narrowed down to 44 heterosexual male guitarists who were fans of metal music. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 47 years, with the majority being from the United States and Poland. The majority were single, had a bachelor’s degree, and identified themselves as middle-class – a demographic representation typical of the two most represented countries.
This is really not a study
Why can't they just copy Tesla's model? Or does Amazon operating a storefront on behalf of the manufacturer preclude that?
In at least some states, to sell more than XX cars per year, you must have a dealer license.
A company vehicle is really no different than a personal vehicle, at least not in this context. They own a truck (titled to them), they can sell a truck via private sale. They don't get any sort of dealer perks (such as not being listed in the history as an owner), they are just selling their property.
That does make a compelling campaign slogan. While I assume Musk's statement should not be taken literally, IIRC he made similar statements about Twitter. Shortly after, there were countless reports of how awful it suddenly became to work at Twitter.
~6 months ago, they were completely proprietary. It's being opened up now, but it doesn't change the history. Tesla home chargers would not work on anything else. The cars came with an adapter to allow them to use J1772 chargers. The adapters to use a Tesla level 1/2 charger on a J1772 car are still hard to find, and mostly from sketchy sources.
Tesla was also forced to adopt (or at least become compatible with) CCS2 in Europe. It's not unreasonable to think that it could happen in the US. Releasing NACS puts them ahead of the curve rather than behind.
I was referring to the chargers (home and other). I know there's a rich history, but I also know that it wasn't being released free and clear when CCS was being developed.
I acknowledge that they are now releasing NACS to the public. In other news, Apple is now using using USB-C. These may or may not be related.
You can 100% just look to Tesla to see what will happen. Tesla has been following the Apple model ("but on cars") since the beginning.
Proprietary connectors? ✔️
Walled garden of accessories? ✔️
Blocking independent repairs? ✔️
Highly integrated experience? ✔️
Sleek and different, but not necessarily good? ✔️
Reality Distortion Field? ✔️
What do you mean by "last"? I know it's a common term, but when you dig deeper, you'll see why it doesn't really make sense. For this discussion, I'm assuming you mean "How long until I need to buy a newer model?"
First, consider the reasons you might have for buying a newer model. The first is hardware failure. Second is obsolescence - the device cannot keep up with newer needs, such as speed, capacity, or interface. The third is insecurity/unsupported from the vendor.
The last one is easy enough to check from a vendor's product lifecycle page. I'll assume this isn't what you're concerned about. Up next is obsolescence. Obviously it meets your needs today, but only you can predict your future needs. Maybe it's fine for a single 1080p* stream today, and that's all you use it for. It will continue to serve that purpose forever. But if your household grows and suddenly you need 3x 4k streams, it might not keep up. Or maybe you'll only need that single 1080p stream for the next 20 years. Maybe you'll hit drive capacity limits, or maybe you won't. We can't answer any of that for you.
That leaves hardware failure. But electronics don't wear out (mechanical drives do, to an extent, but you asked about the NAS). They don't really have an expected life span in the same way as a car battery or an appliance. Instead, they have a failure rate. XX% fail in a given time frame. Even if we assume a bathtub curve (which is a very bold assumption), the point where failures climb is going to be very unclear. The odds are actually very good that it will keep working well beyond that.
Also of note, very few electronics fail before they are obsolete.
*Technically it's about bitrate, but let's just ignore that detail for simplicity. We'll assume that 4k uses 4x as much space as 1080p
TL;DR: It could fail at any moment from the day it was manufactured, or it could outlast all of us. Prepare for that scenario with a decent backup strategy, but don't actually replace it until needed.